Atticus Culver-rease
Forum Replies Created
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Although transcoding both to ProRes is probably the safest and highest-quality method, I’d be curious if people think there are significant problems with only transcoding the H264 stuff to ProRes and putting it in an XDCAM EX timeline with the sequence render settings set to render to ProRes. I’ve done this a couple times in situations where I had a ton of XDCAM EX stuff and only a little bit of H264 stuff, so to transcode both would have taken forever, or where the edit had already begun with XDCAM EX and then the client wanted to add some H264 stuff.
My experience has been that ProRes in an XDCAM EX timeline (again, with sequence settings set to render to ProRes) plays back in real time, doesn’t seem to cause any problems, and doesn’t significantly degrade in quality when you render. My thinking was that where I would normally avoid transcoding material to ProRes and then putting it in a non-native timeline and rendering it, thus introducing another generation of compression, if you’re really rendering to ProRes anyway then perhaps there’s not really such an issue with additional compression from the rendering. I haven’t tested this extensively though, so I’m curious if anyone’s run into problems doing things this way.
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Hmm, well I never actually tried it, but the IO HD because the manual says, “HDCP is not supported on either input or output.” Is that incorrect?
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I’ve done this before, and I had to capture via component because the HDMI output has HDCP. I know the AJA IO doesn’t support HDCP, not sure about other options like the Matrox stuff. When I did it I went component into a Folsom ImagePro HD scan converter and spit out HD-SDI to capture into my system through a Kona 3. Depending on your setup you may be able to go in component directly or use a cheaper converter, but I had the ImagePro handy and knew it would work. The other thing is that the audio output is unbalanced so I had to convert that to feed it to the Kona as well.
You said you’re on a Macbook Pro, what sort of capture device are you using?
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One thing that hasn’t been mentioned among the good suggestions so far… try to have all the same plugins, fonts, etc. available on all the systems. It’s pretty annoying to start an edit on one machine, then come in the next day and be working in a different suite only to find out that you’re missing fonts or plugins that you’d already started using.
Another thing is that if you’re using a SAN and have people working on different projects that share media you have to be very careful that Editor A doesn’t move or delete media that s/he isn’t using while Editor B was using it in another project next door. When I’ve had projects where I’ve been asked to share media I’ve now taken to duplicating it into a new location and working from that instead whenever possible rather than risk someone wiping out my stuff.
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If you just add pulldown to the 24p stuff you can put everything in a 60i timeline and it’ll all play nice. Converting the 60i/30p stuff to 24 is possible, but it’s a lot harder to have it come out looking good.
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Thanks for posting this. I’ll definitely be picking one up.
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If you’re shooting HD but your deliverable is 16:10 SD, just do your shoot at 16:9 but frame for 16:10. Edit at your native 16:9, and then when you’re done and ready to export crop the sides to get to 16:10 and scale down to your final resolution. That way you don’t have to stretch anything.
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The best solution to this would be to just create a matte color of whatever color you’re trying to dip to, put it on track 3 and then use opacity keyframes (or dissolves) to have it fade in and out over your other video tracks. This is pretty much my default way of doing a “dip to color” transition if I have multiple tracks of video being composited underneath.
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Are you usually able to run 200MB project files without running into regular crashes? I’ve had stability problems with large projects in various codecs, including XDCAM EX and ProRes. My experience has been that having a project file over 100MB is asking for trouble, but I’d be curious to hear if other people have been able to do it without issues. If you’ve got old versions of sequences and other things that you probably don’t need but don’t want to delete, just create a copy of your project file and leave them in there for safe keeping, but delete them from the project file you’re actually working in. It sounds like you probably have some other issues as well, but it might be worth a try.
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I’ve had a hard time finding one that I’m happy with and am probably going to end up buying a custom rig that another DP I know had fabricated.
I used the Easyrig once shooting with an Aaton XTR-prod and liked it a lot, but I haven’t tried it with the EX3. To me the Easyrig was pretty much the same as shooting handheld normally, just with some of the weight taken off my shoulder and put on my hips. But I don’t think it would work quite as well with the EX3 since that camera isn’t designed to actually sit on your shoulder, so with the Easyrig I imagine it would just be kind of floating out in front of me. It doesn’t seem like I’d have as much control that way as with a real shoulder mount camera.
There’s another option out there that a couple of vendors in India and China seem to be selling for cheap which people are calling the “El Cheapo” solution (google “el cheapo shoulder mount” and you should find threads about it). It’s actually pretty decent for the price, and I like it more than most of the other options I’ve tried, but it’s obviously not that well made. On the other end of the spectrum are the Zacuto rigs, which I haven’t tried, but if they’re anything like their other products I’m sure they’re very well made although really expensive.
The other options I’ve seen but not gotten my hands on are one that Red Rock makes, and a few different options I saw on filmtools.com.
I’m surprised there’s not a better solution out there yet because it certainly seems like there’s a market for one.